You may have noticed a new component in the Chargify UI - the Prepaid Usage component!

Prepaid usage allows you to maintain a recurring, predictable revenue stream while still allowing your customers to be charged based on consumption. This is achieved through an upfront fee that is based on a quantity (or prepayment) sometimes thought of as a commitment. Your customer then draws down against their commitment. Once their entire commitment amount is used up they are charged overage fees at a ‘burst over’ rate. Overage charges are then calculated and included in your customers' regular billing cycle and invoice, this allows you and your customer to maintain a single source of truth on what they are consuming and being billed for.

With prepaid usage, your customers' prepaid amounts can 're-up' every month (I commit to 50 server hours each month) or can extend out for longer periods of time (I commit to 550 server hours for the year).

Companies often move to prepaid usage models because they can incentivize their customers to increase upfront commitments or prepaid quantities, by offering a reduced price point for prepaid units or an increased rate for overage units. It is also possible to allow your customers' prepaid quantities to expire or rollover to a following period.

Our Chargify prepaid usage functionality also supports your revenue and accounting compliance needs. As your customer consumes their prepaid amounts, Chargify tracks their consumption for appropriate revenue reporting and recognition. This is all handled with a single component in the Chargify system, reducing the complexity of setup and maintenance for your team.

To learn more about the prepaid usage billing model, see our documentation >

Consolidated invoices are a win-win for both you and your end-customer. For you, consolidated invoicing presents less processing fees when one customer pays for their multiple subscriptions all-in-one. For your end-customers, they get a single invoice for all subscriptions that they can pay for in one transaction. 

Adding to our consolidated invoicing functionality, we are excited to announce some additions to the invoice history you can call via the API. These consolidated invoices now include prepayments automatically applied to member subscriptions. When member subscriptions renew, any prepayments would apply directly to the child invoice. 

Please note that since this action was not directly on the parent subscription, the history/event for automatically applied prepayments was not previously shown on the consolidated invoice. This event can now be found for the consolidated invoice in the Read Invoice Events endpoint under the event name "link_child_payment".

For more information on consolidated invoices, see our documentation here>

Integrating Chagify with thousands of the most popular applications is made possible through our Zapier Connector. Many of our customers today leverage Zapier to automate workflows with no code required, so your teams can focus on getting the most important work done. 

We are excited to announce that we have new supported actions that have similar behavior when updating a subscription using the Zapier Connector. Those new triggers are:

• expires_at
• next_billing_at
• Quantity Based Components 

These additional attributes will allow for further customization with your Zaps to enable streamlined operational processes. This is in early access stages, so anyone interested should contact their CSM or our support team (support@chargify.com) for an invitation to our 1.0.4 Zapier Connector. It will become generally available In the coming weeks. 

For more information on our Zapier Connector, see Zapier's App Documentation>

Last week we announced that our native HubSpot integration is now listed on the HubSpot App Marketplace. For your customer-facing teams (Sales, Customer Success, Marketing and Support), this integration creates a whirlwind of efficiencies by providing them the features and functionality to easily manage subscriptions and gain insights from your Chargify data all within the tool they know the most: HubSpot. 

For sales managers who are using more than the 'Sales' pipeline in HubSpot, we understand that Deal pipelines help visualize your sales process to predict revenue and identify selling roadblocks. Our Product Team continues to enhance this integration to better serve your use cases and today we are excited to announce that we have extended the functionality to your HubSpot Custom Deal Pipelines.

Interested in integrating your Chargify and HubSpot environments today? Head on over to the HubSpot App Marketplace to download and install, or turn on via the configuration wizard within Chargify's 'Integrations' page. Need some help? Reach out to your CSM or contact us at support@chargify.com. 

For more information on our HubSpot integration, see our documentation here>

An integrated tech stack built with your Salesforce CRM can provide a customized experience to your clients and prospects. The Chargify + Salesforce integration is a flexible one-stop-shop for your customer-facing teams to effectively serve your current and future client base.

New to our native integration is the ability to use Chargify's product catalog to add line items to a Salesforce Quote. When creating a quote in Salesforce, you can now use Chargify's wizard to create subscriptions that will be added to the quote. 

This new functionality allows users to create multiple subscriptions on a quote with products, components, and coupons. Once the deal is won, the subscription(s) will be created in Chargify. 

For more information on how to setup the CPQ wizard, see our documentation here>

Providing a convenient, fast, and safe method on collecting payment from your customers is key to building and maintaining that recurring revenue relationship. Chargify's core functionality on sending invoices provides an easy way to both send automatic and ad-hoc invoices via email. 

We are excited to announce that we have extended our functionality to include sending multiple invoices to a customer in one email. When managing a subscription’s invoices, you can apply filters to refine the invoice selections before selecting 'Email Customer' option. You can attach up to 24 invoices in one single email.

For more information on sending emailed invoices to customers, see our documentation here>

We understand that some of our customers are entering external payments into Chargify, and oftentimes the day it gets entered is not the same day it was received. In order to support downstream reporting and align the date you received these external payments (such as paper checks via mail), you can now specify a received_on date for external payments. 

In the UI, users can provide an effective date via Invoices > Invoice Show > Record Payment > Record External Payment. The received_on date will be set to the current day by default, but the user can backdate by changing the received_on field.

For historic reporting, this field has been backfilled with the created_date date in order to facilitate reporting from this field; however, the received_on date can only be different from the created_date going forward. 

In the UI, received_on will be exposed in the /payments and /transactions pages and exports. Please note that this is the /transactions page, not the new Transactions Report page. There are plans to add this field to the new Transactions Report page in the future.

The received_on date is also available via the following API endpoints: transactions, invoice, and invoice-events. 

For more information on backdating a received date for external payments, see our documentation here>

It’s easier than ever to send data from your application to Chargify Business Intelligence for custom analysis. With this information, you can hone in on how your users are consuming your product and identify key value metrics. Then, leverage this data to build complex, multi-attribute pricing models that charge your customers for the exact value they receive. 

Take a Data Ingestion Tool for example, with Events-Based Billing, they can charge different rates based on: Cloud Provider, Data Center Region, Cluster Type, and Availability.

Data Read Event Rate per GB:

To start streaming your data to Chargify, head to Business Intelligence and select ‘Manage Data Sources’. From there, you will be asked to define your new data source. You can follow this guide to start streaming your data in. 

For more information on Chargify Business Intelligence, see our documentation here>

The tax landscape for recurring revenue businesses can oftentimes be difficult to manage, leading to confusion on how to effectively apply taxes to your products and services. Adding to that complexity is determining a final price for your product that includes tax so that your customers are only advertised and charged one single price.

Within Chargify, your Avalara Managed Sales Tax account helps eliminate the ongoing headaches in managing sales tax for your recurring revenue business. Adding to Chargify's native Avalara functionality, our Product Team was recently working on a beta feature with some of our customers. We are happy to announce that this new feature is now in general availability!  

You can now utilize a 'tax included' option when setting your final prices in your Product Catalog within the UI. For example, if you want the final price (with taxes included) to be $20 for one of your subscription offerings, you can choose the "Tax included in price?" when building out your price point. Your customer will be billed $20, and in turn you will be collecting your subscription base price + tax. 

For more information on Avalara Managed Sales Tax, see our documentation for products here and for components here>